Skip to main content

Bookbinding, contd.

I took the first class on Saturday, three classes behind everyone else because I was on a waiting list and someone dropped out after the course started. This means I get double classes the next three Saturdays so I can catch up with the others. Oh yes, the others: I am by far the youngest student in the class which is a merry group of (mostly) pensioners. Everyone but one woman belongs to my grandparents’ generation, and the one exception is of my parents’ generation. The teacher tells me that not many younger people want to take bookbinding classes, perhaps a sign that the disposable mentality has firmly established itself.

I got started preparing and binding a collection of small booklets of fairy tales I have owned since I was a child and were published before my parents were born. In this first class I learned to repair pages, prepare endpapers, ready the book for binding and hand-sew the signatures together, and also how to take apart a book for rebinding. The teacher recommends having 8-10 books on the go at a time so that I will learn the methods well, so when I got home I scoured my bookshelves and storage room for books in need of rebinding and unbound books that are not so valuable or precious to me that failure or clumsy handiwork will spoil them for me. On Saturday night and Sunday afternoon I sat in front of the TV, watching DVDs of my favourite movies and picking apart book after book. The next step is to repair them as needed so they will be ready for rebinding when I get to class next Saturday.

Here is what I have done so far: The signatures are all bound together, but it still needs some finishing touches before it is ready for the cover. Notice the rust on the edges of some of the signatures? They were stapled together and before I got them they had been stored somewhere damp enough to rust the staples and stain the paper. I only hope the rust will not continue to deteriorate the paper now the cause has been removed.

Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting



---

BTW, if you’re waiting for me to continue reviewing – I have not read much lately and have additionally been suffering from reviewer’s block (more on that later). I have four author reviews I have started, but all of them are waiting until I finish one more book so I can give a reliable review of the author.
Labels:

Comments

nessie said…
OH MY GOD I am sooo jealous. I have been looking all over montreal for something like this and can not find it at all.

does it help that I am 24 yrs old. still hope right? i am not that old?
January 30, 2007 5:53 am
Bibliophile said…
I wish you luck in finding a bookbinding course. Bookbinding is such a rewarding hobby. I'd say that at 24 you still have some time to find a course :-)
Perhaps a professional bookbinder will be willing to teach you privately if there are no courses available.
January 30, 2007 2:11 pm
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Book 40: The Martian by Andy Weir, audiobook read by Wil Wheaton

Note : This will be a general scattershot discussion about my thoughts on the book and the movie, and not a cohesive review. When movies are based on books I am interested in reading but haven't yet read, I generally wait to read the book until I have seen the movie, but when a movie is made based on a book I have already read, I try to abstain from rereading the book until I have seen the movie. The reason is simple: I am one of those people who can be reduced to near-incoherent rage when a movie severely alters the perfectly good story line of a beloved book, changes the ending beyond recognition or adds unnecessarily to the story ( The Hobbit , anyone?) without any apparent reason. I don't mind omissions of unnecessary parts so much (I did not, for example, become enraged to find Tom Bombadil missing from The Lord of the Rings ), because one expects that - movies based on books would be TV-series long if they tried to include everything, so the material must be pared down
Post a Comment
Read more

List love: 10 recommended stories with cross-dressing characters

This trope is almost as old as literature, what with Achilles, Hercules and Athena all cross-dressing in the Greek myths, Thor and Odin disguising themselves as women in the Norse myths, and Arjuna doing the same in the Mahabaratha. In modern times it is most common in romance novels, especially historicals in which a heroine often spends part of the book disguised as a boy, the hero sometimes falling for her while thinking she is a boy. Occasionally a hero will cross-dress, using a female disguise to avoid recognition or to gain access to someplace where he would never be able to go as a man. However, the trope isn’t just found in romances, as may be seen in the list below, in which I recommend stories with a variety of cross-dressing characters. Unfortunately I was only able to dredge up from the depths of my memory two book-length stories I had read in which men cross-dress, so this is mostly a list of women dressed as men. Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb. One of the interwove
Post a Comment
Read more

First book of 2020: The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by Deborah Moggach (reading notes)

I don't know if I've mentioned it before, but I loathe movie tie-in book covers because I feel they are (often) trying to tell me how I should see the characters in the book. The edition of Deborah Moggach's These Foolish Things that I read takes it one step further and changes the title of the book into the title of the film version as well as having photos of the ensemble cast on the cover. Fortunately it has been a long while since I watched the movie, so I couldn't even remember who played whom in the film, and I think it's perfectly understandable to try to cash in on the movie's success by rebranding the book. Even with a few years between watching the film and reading the book, I could see that the story had been altered, e.g. by having the Marigold Hotel's owner/manager be single and having a romance, instead being of unhappily married to an (understandably, I thought) shrewish wife. It also conflates Sonny, the wheeler dealer behind the retireme
Post a Comment
Read more